The Company of Adventurers

By Isaac Cowie

A comprehensive, ancient and modern history of the Hudson’s Bay Company has yet to be written. It will probably be the work of many minds, each dealing with different aspects of its vast and varied operations, and tinged with the personality and prejudices of each writer. In the Dominion of the Fur Trade, extending far beyond the far-flung frontiers of the present Dominion of Canada, the fur traders were the pioneers of the British Empire, and, if that Empire to-day does not include all the regions they explored and exploited in the grand old days of yore, the glory of their deeds of daring should not be forgotten, nor should it be diminished, because the British Government and the Company’s directors from time to time suffered the North-Western States, Oregon and California and the interior of Alaska, to fall into the hands of American rivals.
In a vast territory where history was made at every important fur-trading post, by men who seldom attempted to leave written records which have been allowed to see the light of day in print, it is to-day a task of as great difficulty to exhume the buried remains of the human and personal history of individual pioneers as it is to find in the buried cities of the ancient Orient the material by which men of science of the present day try to interpret the past and depict it. True, many, in fact a surprisingly great number of books have been written by eminent explorers of the highest merits, as well as many by very able authors as the result of their studies of books and documents to which they had access—often denied the public; but these latter writers are all more or less special pleaders for views, more or less distorted by race and religion, and other circumstances over which they had as little control.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Librorium Editions
• Release date: Nov 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9782385744663

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A French Idea Adopted by Prince Rupert.

In Old Quebec, even as in the old Red River Settlement later, while a few small farmers had been established and found a market in the home consumption for their produce, the trading and trapping in furs afforded the first and chief motives of the early French, their source of personal profit and sole source of public revenue. That revenue had not only to provide for local expenditures but also tribute to the French Crown or its resident or non-resident favorites. Heavy license fees and duties were levied for permission to trade in furs and on the furs themselves, which, as in the case of the Hudson’s Bay Territories later, were the only articles exportable with profit from the colony.

The laborious occupation of farming was regarded with contempt by the gentlemen of old feudal France who had come to try their fortune in the new country and to fight for it in their genteel profession of arms. They had souls above any kind of trade—except that in furs, which afforded rich prizes in profits, and demanded in the wilds the best qualities of the courageous soldier in its prosecution.

The results of the adventures of these daring soldier fur traders were enviably lucrative, as a monopoly guarded by licenses only given to favorites. Hence there arose free traders even in those days, who took the liberty, without having the license, to try their fortunes in the alluring depths of the unexplored forests of New France and the regions unknown beyond. And two of these free traders, who were detested by the colonial governors as smugglers and criminals as such, became, through the persecutions to which they were subjected in that regard, the founders of that Last Great Monopoly—The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson’s Bay.

Radisson and Groseillers.

These two great worthies were Pierre Esprit Radisson and Medard Chouart Groseillers, both of whom were born in France. The latter was first married to a daughter of Abraham Martin, who gave his name to the historic Plains of Abraham, the field of Wolfe’s conquest and death, and whose second wife was Radisson’s sister. Groseillers had been a lay helper to the Jesuit missionaries while a youth, but Radisson appears to have never allowed any religious leanings to interfere with his secular objects, and is sometimes said to have incurred animosity on the part of the priests for his suspected Protestantism. The yoke of his allegiance to France, and when he changed it to England, sat as lightly on Radisson as did the ties of religion.

The histories of Radisson and the diverse estimates of his almost incomprehensible character and almost incredible adventures and achievements have been told in many books, which, with others, no doubt to follow, will be read with intense interest in this truly remarkable man, and with admiration of his unique exploits, if not of the methods he often adopted to achieve them. In this place, however, only a brief synopsis of his romantic career may be given, principally taken from Miss Laut’s fascinating book, The Pathfinders of the West.

Radisson was born at St. Malo, in Normandy, in 1632. At the age of seventeen he sallied out from the shelter of the settlement of Three Rivers, Quebec, for sport in the woods, and was captured by the Iroquois Indians. With characteristic adaptability he took to the Indian life and was adopted into the tribe, from whom he escaped to the Dutch Fort Orange, and found his way by sea, via Europe, back to Three Rivers, in 1654, after two years’ absence, and was welcomed home as one back from the dead. Three years afterwards he joined the Onondaga expedition, was besieged with it and saved it from the Iroquois. In 1658 he started on a trapping and exploring expedition, and passing by Lakes Nipissing and Huron wintered at Green Bay; then by way of modern Wisconsin he reached and discovered the Upper Mississippi, and explored in the present Minnesota and Manitoba. On his return he had an encounter with the Iroquois on the Ottawa, and arrived at Montreal in 1660. Next year, eluding the authorities, he set out with Groseillers again, hoping to reach Hudson Bay, and built a wintering post near the present Duluth, from which he visited the Sioux camps, and is supposed to have reached Lake Winnipeg. From this expedition he returned to Quebec in 1663. Says Miss Laut: England and France alike conspired to crush the man while he lived; and when he died they quarrelled over the glory of his discoveries. The point is not whether he reached Hudson or James Bay or not, but that he found where the bay lay and the watershed sloping towards it. The cargo of furs brought back, from the wilderness they had discovered, was worth $300,000 in modern money. Of this, after being mulcted by the governor of New France for leaving without his permission, and for royalties and revenue, Radisson and Groseillers had less than $20,000 left.

The Tipping of the Scales—From New France to Old England.

Had the governors of New France encouraged instead of persecuted the discoverers, says Miss Laut, France could have claimed all North America but the narrow strip of New England on the east and the Spanish settlements on the south. Having repudiated Radisson and Groseillers, France could not claim the fruits of deeds which she punished.

Groseillers spent his time and money in a vain attempt to obtain justice and restitution in Paris. The influence of the licensed trading company, to whom the monopoly in fur trade was given as favorites at court, was too strong against him. Radisson and he then determined to find their way into Hudson Bay by sea, without asking French leave, but by taking it from Canada. In Boston they met Captain Zechariah Gillam, and set out in his ship for the voyage, but had to turn back owing to the lateness of the season. Next spring, 1665, one of the two ships contracted for with their owners in Boston was wrecked on Sable Island, which resulted in a lawsuit which exhausted all their resources, but brought their exploits to the ear of a British Commissioner in New England, who urged them to renounce their allegiance to ungrateful France and go to England, where they arrived in 1666. The plague was then raging in London, and there was war with the Dutch during which nothing could be done. But the court favored the plan to trade in Hudson Bay laid before King Charles II., who meanwhile allowed the adventurers forty shillings per week.

Prince Rupert.

A fellow-feeling makes one wondrous kind. To the equally adventurous, dashing cavalry leader and free rover of the seas, Prince Rupert, these free rovers of the wilds appealed as kindred spirits. His own needs as well as his quick intelligence also urged his sympathies into taking up their promising project as his own. So, the Dutch war being over, in the spring of 1668, two vessels were despatched with the first trading outfit for Hudson Bay. The Eagle, in which went Radisson, was driven back to London, badly damaged, but the Nonsuch, Captain Gillam, with Groseillers on board, anchored at the mouth of Rupert’s River on the 29th of September, after a voyage of three months from Gravesend, of which two were occupied in reaching Resolution Island at the mouth of Hudson Straits.

The First Hudson’s Bay Company’s Fort.

Near the mouth of Rupert’s River Groseillers built a palisaded fort which was named by him after King Charles (but the modern successor has long been called Rupert’s House instead), and in the summer of 1669 the Nonsuch returned to London with a full cargo of furs, and Groseillers received honor and reward.

The Royal Charter.

Although Radisson had been baffled in making the voyage in the Eagle, like a good general he turned the defeat into victory; for on his return to London he allied himself to the daughter of Sir John Kirke and assisted Prince Rupert in organizing the fur company, to which the success of the voyage of the Nonsuch assured the royal charter granted in May, 1670, to Prince Rupert, as Governor, and his Company of Adventurers of England, consisting of a duke, an earl, two barons, three baronets, four knights, five esquires, and John Portman, citizen and goldsmith of London.

Prince Rupert actively directed the operations of the Company till the time of his death. Had he lived longer no doubt his schemes of activity and enterprise would have been carried out and left as a legacy of success for his successors to follow. He was succeeded by the Duke of York, afterwards James II, the last of the Stuart kings. The great general, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, followed the Duke of York as governor; and the office and that of director has ever after been filled by men of title and station, with strong influence at court and with the government of the day, as well as others of established business ability and standing.

A Century on the Coast.

Till 1674 the two great French explorers and traders remained on the Bay, having, in addition to Fort Charles, established a post at Moose, in 1671, and made a trading voyage to the mouth of the Nelson. After the first three years of most successful trade with the Indians at Fort Charles it began to fall off on account of the increased activity of the French from the south. Groseillers counselled moving inland and driving off such competition, but the English factor (Bailey) objected, and proposed moving to the west coast of the Bay, where there would be no rivalry. Divided counsels, intensified by the Englishman’s suspicion of foreigners and his ignorance of a trade in which his French associates were past masters, led to quarrels, and Radisson was recalled home by the ship in 1674. After six years, which he spent in the service of France, from which he had received pardon and a commission in the navy, Radisson returned to Quebec in 1681, and set out with his nephew, Baptiste Groseillers, in two small vessels, which entered Hayes River, and, ascending it fifteen miles from salt water, anchored. While Groseillers built a trading post, Radisson paddled up stream towards Lake Winnipeg to notify the Indians of their presence. The post was named Fort Bourbon and the river was named Ste. Therese, and York Fort, which became the great emporium of the Hudson’s Bay Company, was afterwards established in the vicinity, within easier reach of the sea.

It is impossible to follow the romantic and varied career of this prince of explorers further than to say that a ship under Captain Gillam’s son from Boston and a Hudson’s Bay ship from London both entered the Nelson River while the French were on the Hayes, that Radisson outwitted and captured both, and on returning to Quebec was again assailed with similar ill-treatment by his fellow countrymen there. Again he was driven by French injustice to the English side, and, returning with the Company’s ship to Hayes River, in 1684, he secured from his nephew the transfer of his fort and his furs to the English, between whom and the Indians he then arranged a peace treaty, which has endured to this day. It will well repay all interested readers to look up his detailed history in The Pathfinders of the West and other books. The last trace of this wonderful man, the actual originator of the great Company, is to be found merely in the final entry of the payment of an annual allowance of £50 in their books in 1710.

Space also forbids anything but a mere mention of the capture by the French of the posts on the Bay, and their restoration, generally by negotiation in treaties between the two countries on the termination of their frequently recurring wars. The necessity of attempting to defend the Bay posts while they remained in their own hands, and the impossibility of attempting to extend their trade into the interior when these were in the hands of the French, are very good reasons why the Company made no very great effort to reach the interior. Again, it was much more profitable to allow the Indians to bring the furs to the Bay than for the traders to go to the expense and privation, not to speak of the risk, of penetrating into the vast unknown regions of the interior. Neither was the class of officers and men of the English company suitable, or rendered suitable by training, to encounter the dexterous and daring coureur de bois in his chosen ground and occupation. It was not until the cession of Canada by France in 1763 that it became possible for British fur traders to employ the French-Canadians, with complete confidence in their reliability, in the fur-trading operations in the Indian countries for which they were so admirably adapted by nature and training, qualities of which the North-West Company made such great use subsequently.

In spite of these adverse considerations, the directors in London frequently urged their factors on the Bay to at least send men to the up-country to attract new tribes to resort to the factories of the coast. Beckles Wilson, in his book on The Great Company, after dwelling upon the unsuitable character of the servants for such service, says that the factors dreaded equally the prospect of leading an expedition into the interior themselves, and the prestige which might be gained by a subordinate in doing so. The inducements offered by the Company do not appear either to have been adequate to induce men to volunteer for such unusual and dangerous service, and Mr. Wilson only mentions three young men as exceptions to the general rule. These were William Bond, who was drowned in the Bay some years later, and Thomas Moore and George Geyer, who continued for some years to set an example which was not followed by others, and of which they finally got tired, before subsequently attaining the rank of governors.

Forty Years Before Vérandrye.

Indeed, says Mr. Wilson, almost without exception, once a fort was built the servants seem to have clung closely to it, and it was not till the year 1688 that a really brave, adventurous figure, bearing considerable resemblance to the bushrangers of the past and the explorers of the future, emerges into the light of history. Henry Kelsey, a lad of barely eighteen years of age, was the forerunner of all the hardy British pioneers of the ensuing century. He is described as active, ‘delighting much in Indians’ company, being never better pleased than when he is travelling among them.’ Young as he was, Kelsey volunteered to find out a site for a fort on Churchill River. No record exists of this voyage; but a couple of years later he repeated it, and himself kept a diary of his tour.

He set out in July, 1691, and penetrated to the country of the Assiniboines, the buffalo and the grizzly bear, forty years before Vérandrye’s voyages of discovery; and in behalf of the Hudson’s Bay Company had taken possession of the lands he traversed, and had secured for his masters the trade of Indians hitherto considered hostile. That the success of Kelsey was as much due to his adapting himself to ways suited to the circumstances of the country at that time, and long afterwards, as well as to his other qualities, is shown by this next quotation: He returned to York Factory after this first expedition, apparelled after the manner of his Indian companions, while at his side trudged a young woman with whom he had gone through the ceremony of marriage after the Indian fashion. It was his desire that Mistress Kelsey should enter with her husband into the court, but this desire quickly found an opponent in the Governor, whose scruples, however, were soon undermined when the explorer flatly declined to resume his place and duties in the establishment unless his Indian wife were admitted with him.

Hearne, the Great Explorer.

While the exploits of Radisson, and those less dazzling of Kelsey, may be comparatively unknown to the general public, the name of Samuel Hearne, the discoverer of the Coppermine River to the Arctic Ocean and the Athabasca Lake in his voyages alone with Indians, which ended successfully in 1772, those who have studied geography have often read. In the Athabasca he preceded the grand explorers of the North-West Company, who completed the work on the Mackenzie which he had begun to the eastward.

That Hearne was a man of intrepid courage his wonderful journeys testify. His horror at the massacre of the poor Esquimaux by his Indians at the Bloody Fall of the Coppermine also bore witness to his humanity, and he showed moral courage of the highest order when, to prevent the needless slaughter of his garrison of forty men in Fort Prince of Wales, he surrendered that great stronghold—impregnable had it been manned by its complement of four hundred men—to the overwhelming force of the famous French admiral, La Perouse, in three great ships of war, by whom he was surprised.

Hearne was originally of the Company’s sea service and had taken part in several of the many expeditions fitted out by the Company for the discovery of the North-West Passage from Hudson Bay, to which this passing allusion only can be made here.

The Daring Enterprise of the North-West Company.

The very important fact may be news to many that the present Hudson’s Bay Company is the lineal successor to the honor and glory acquired by the old North-West Company of Montreal, in its discoveries in and occupation of the countries which are now Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia. It is well to recall to the recollection of Canadians that the union of the North-West with the old Hudson’s Bay Company was effected upon equal terms, each supplying an equal amount of capital and the Canadian company putting in their rights of discovery and occupancy of the country as a set-off to the claims of the English company under their royal charter, to retain the benefit of which the proud Nor’-Westers consented to the elimination of their name in the united concern.

Not only did the Nor’-Westers merge their claims and their capital with those of the old Hudson’s Bay Company, but they also furnished the coalition with the men and methods by whose means their business had been conducted with such marvellous success and enterprise.

But before this mutually beneficial arrangement had been arrived at the old English company had been roused from its passive policy of waiting on the coast for its customers to come down from the far interior, by the traders from Canada cutting the line of communications and intercepting the Indians in the interior on their way to the Bay. New blood was introduced in the class of employees at the same time as the new policy of adopting that of its competitors. Hearne was sent up and chose as the site of the central inland establishment the passage between the main Saskatchewan and the Upper Churchill River, near which, at Portage la Traite, Frobisher had intercepted the Chipewyans bound for the bay with such a quantity of furs as to render him independent for life by the profit thereon.

Many of the North-West officers were Highland Jacobites themselves or sons of those who had fought at Culloden, or were related by blood to those who had been defeated and butchered after the fight by the orders of the Duke of Cumberland. So when Hearne, in 1774, gave to the new Hudson’s Bay house at this strategic point on the route of the Nor’-Westers the detested name of Cumberland, the English company appeared to intend to add insult as well as injury to the clansmen.

The Struggle Between the Rival Companies Begins.

The gage of battle was thus thrown down by the Hudson’s Bay Company by the planting of that settlement which Mr. Hearne hath called Cumberland House, which is twenty-six feet broad, thirty-eight feet long and twenty-one and one-half feet in height, says Mr. H. Marten, chief of York Fort, in a letter to Mr. William Falconer, master of Severn House, January 1st, 1776. The Hudson’s Bay Company in any big enterprise has always been slow to begin, but once started, its determination and enterprise in pursuing the path set before it have usually aroused alarm in the camp of its opponents and the admiration of its friends.

The pin-pricks inflicted by the cursory excursions of the petty traders from New France inland on its trade coming to the coast, while annoying to Moose and Albany, had not been sufficiently injurious to cause any general movement to establish posts in the up-country, except one on the Moose and several on the Albany River. But the great bulk of the furs came to York and Churchill, and were brought down from the far interior by the Indians themselves, and the cutting of this line of communication by the British Canadian traders, after the conquest of Canada, was a tail-twisting exploit which roused the British lion from his slumbers in security on the sea coast.

Like a lion in his wrath the Bay Company took the field aggressively and reached the Indians of the interior, from their coign of vantage on the coast of the Bay long before the earliest canoes of the Canadians could arrive from Montreal. The Englishmen brought, too, a superior quality of goods (a traditional policy continued to this day); fixed prices—the same to chief or child—for goods and furs; and inflexible honesty in word and deed in their dealings with the Indians. Their goods were not only better in general quality, but they also took in exchange the heavier and less valuable furs, while the canoemen from Montreal only wanted the lighter and more valuable peltries owing to the handicap of their long and difficult journey to the base at Montreal. Moreover, the familiar and friendly French employees of the Canadian traders, while they might be better liked by the natives, did not command the same respect and trust which the English and Orkney servants of the Hudson’s Bay Company received from the Indians.

The North-West Company Formed.

To meet the policy of the Hudson’s Bay Company, no longer defensive but offensive, the private unassociated Montreal traders banded together and in 1783 united in the splendid organization of the North-West Company. Many books have been written of the deeds of the daring officers and men of this wonderful company, and probably many more will be written ere the fascination and historical interest of the subject are exhausted. Briefly as it must be merely mentioned herein, the personnel in officers and men was a rare combination of the most efficient races. The officers were chiefly men of Scottish Highland blood and of the lineage of the chiefs of their clans, who had come to Canada as soldiers of fortune to retrieve fortunes shattered by espousing the cause of the Stuart kings. The men were of a race renowned in old France for its warlike virtues, which coming to Canada and taking to the woods as hunters and to the waters as voyageurs had become pre-eminently the best qualified for service in the fur trade. Behind this fighting force were the brains and the money of far-seeing, shrewd merchants in Montreal, who on the cession of Canada had come to exploit its resources, and its chief resource up to that time, and long after, was the richness of the country in furs.

Strong as was this combination of forces the company was also bound together and vivified by the co-operative alliance between capital and labor, in which the youngest apprentice clerk in the wilds was animated to feats of zeal and devotion to the interests of the company by the assured prospect of promotion to the rank of wintering partner in a business of which the profits were immense. In a vast wilderness where employees could neither be reached by swift commands nor watched by the eye of a master, every partner and every subordinate aspiring to such office gave every energy to the benefit of the business which they regarded as their own. And when in the fulness of time the company with the Royal Charter and that with the co-operative principle laid down their arms through exhaustion, and coalesced in the union under the chartered company’s name, this principle, essential to preserve the esprit de corps which had distinguished the operations of the North-West Company, was retained as part and parcel of the terms of union. This was the more readily arranged because the Hudson’s Bay Company had been accustomed to allow their factors and captains a certain bonus on the profits of individual commands, and the system of the Nor’-Westers was an amplified and extended improvement thereon.

In the year after the establishment of Cumberland House by the Hudson’s Bay Company, the Canadian traders, who were later to form the North-West Company, proceeded to connect the discoveries of the early French explorers on the Saskatchewan with that of the Hudson’s Bay discoverer, Hearne, on Lake Athabasca, and in doing so established a chain of posts by the Upper Churchill—called by them the English River—Portage la Loche, and the Clearwater and Athabasca Rivers. On Lake Athabasca was founded Fort Chipewyan, which, as the centre of waterways radiating therefrom to every point of the compass, remains to this day the fur capital of the Great North Land.

From this strategic base Alexander Mackenzie started on his magnificent career by discovering the mighty river which bears his name, and following it to the Arctic Ocean. Next, departing from Fort Chipewyan, he ascended the Peace River to McLeod’s Fort, in the vicinity of the present Dunvegan, and plunged into the great unknown Peace River gorge of the Rocky Mountains, and the land of the mountain and the flood—well-named New Caledonia—to emerge triumphant over every danger and distress on the shore of the vast Pacific—the first civilized man to cross by land, 22nd of July, 1783, the country which is now Canada. These marvellous voyages were made possible by Mackenzie’s French-Canadian voyageurs, who were there at the finish of the course set by Cartier, La Salle and La Vérandrye to La Chine, although between them and China there rolled the immensity of the waterway across the Pacific.

The lead given by Mackenzie was followed by the establishment of posts along the routes explored by him, and, on the Pacific slope, by his fellow companymen and countrymen, Stuart, Fraser and Thompson, on the Fraser and the Columbia and their feeders to the sea.

The Commercial War in the Wilderness.

From the time of the cession of Canada down to the treaty of peace and union between the rival fur traders in 1821, a period of some sixty years, a war in trade and traffic continued with increasing intensity between the British subjects from Canada and those from Hudson Bay in the fur country. While the Nor’-Westers increased their traffic by ever fresh discoveries, the men from the Bay followed the paths so opened up, always excepting those beyond the Rocky Mountains, into which country their royal charter was not claimed to extend. Neither did it, contended the Nor’-Westers—even if it might be valid,—extend to the Athabasca and Mackenzie country, which drained into the Arctic Ocean, unlike the country of Rupert’s Land which sent its waters into Hudson Bay according to the wording of the gift of King Charles II., to his entirely-beloved cousin, Prince Rupert, and his Adventurers of England.

The scope of this book does not allow any attempt at detail of the intricate and innumerable petty feuds and forays between the rival fur traders, which enlivened the otherwise dull monotony of their existence. These were perhaps provoked more frequently and even joyfully by the brave dunniewassal from Scotland and the fighting French of the Nor’-Westers than by the staider Englishmen and Orkneymen of the Hudson’s Bay service.

These minor collisions were very frequently caused by the Indians, outfitted by the Nor’-Westers, giving the furs secured by their means and at their risk of loss, to their opponents. As an Indian could no more produce furs in any quantity without the equipment, which, by the necessities of his improvident nature, had to be advanced by a trader, than the unsown field of a farmer a crop, it was very annoying for the trader who had taken the risk to see his opponent reap where he had not sown. From my own more modern experience in this way with free traders I can fully sympathize with the Nor’-Westers, who, exasperated in that way, used force to right the wrong, in a wilderness where writs did not run and

"The good old rule, the simple plan

That those should take who have the power,

And those should keep who can"

prevailed, and was practised by the stronger trading party, whether its flag flew on its fly the letters N.W.C. or H.B.C.

Those Canadians, who had succeeded to the rights of discovery, exploration and trade acquired by the early French pioneers, and who, not content with following paths previously made plain by these, had made the furthest points reached by their predecessors their own points of fresh departure for the discovery of the richer fur countries which lay beyond the basin draining into the Hudson Bay, to be followed and harassed by traders who had slumbered on the Bay till this great and notable work had been accomplished, would not have been ordinary men had they not deeply resented the intrusion of the Hudson’s Bay Company to reap where they had not sown. But the Nor’-Westers were extraordinary men, both in brawn and brain, and they fought with both, and would have beaten the Bay Company, too, had it not been a Company with a convenient base on Hudson Bay, whilst that of the North-West Company was at the end of the long canoe route at the distant port of Montreal.

The Schemes of Selkirk.

The causes and the class of the minor troubles between the rival traders resided in the nature of the business, and they prevailed between the Canadian individual traders and different companies before they united as a measure of defence against the common foe—the Hudson’s Bay Company. The causes of conflict were not, therefore, between the Hudson’s Bay Company as an old country concern and the North-West Company as a colonial combination. In fact, despite the natural resentment of the Canadians against the intruding English, for mutual comfort and protection their posts were often placed side by side in dangerous Indian districts. Probably they disliked each other less, being whites in a savage country, than rival storekeepers in Winnipeg do to-day—only the old fur trader had to administer the law himself, according to his light and power, and the city merchant is constrained to resort to the courts of justice.

Matters were in this state when the then Earl of Selkirk conceived the idea of forming an utterly isolated settlement on the Red River. In this invasion of the wilds he went contrary to the teaching of all ancient and modern military art as well as the dictates of common sense, which, had the latter been used, would have clearly shown him that the invasion of a country to be permanent and successful must be sustained by an easily travelled line of communication with its base. This the old sailing craft coming once a year to Hudson Bay did not provide, much less the route for row boats and over rapids and portages which had been used by the boatmen of the fur traders, inured to superhuman toil, but was in the state in which the hand of nature had left it.

It is but fair to say, however, that he had seen the need of a port on the Bay and of the right to improve the route between it and his projected colony, which the grant he secured from the Hudson’s Bay Company provided for. But instead of first protecting his line of communication—to still use the military terms—he hurled a flying column of his invading colonists into the heart of an Indian country, without the consent of the natives, and against the advice of the only whites who knew the territory. Neither were these settlers, who had thus been thrust into danger, in sufficient numbers to have been capable of self-defence against the warlike tribes of the Red River valley. The vanguard should have been a sufficient force of soldiers—not untrained settlers with helpless and innocent women and children alike to be defended and to hamper the defence.

Selkirk had been for years meditating this project, and had ample control over the Hudson’s Bay Company to have seen that such food as the country afforded and some shelter should have been provided in advance for his settlers. The want of these drove them into the degradation and danger of having to find them, away from the site of proposed farming operations, amongst the Indians on the buffalo plains. In a country where the safety of the whites, among an overwhelming number of natives, depended so much on their racial prestige, this was a fatal error. Even an experienced fur trader, left by himself in most friendly Indian camps on the plains, and unhampered by wife or child of his race, had an unenviable duty which could only be performed if he were nerved by courage and fidelity. Fortunately the Indians treated the unfortunate refugees with kindness and humanity; but amongst Indians as well as in every other community there are always bad men who must have been an ever-present cause of anxiety to the settlers and their families.

If a monument is to be erected to Lord Selkirk, another one one hundred times as impressive should be made to the memory of the brave white women who came with their men folk to undergo all the dangers and hardships both inherent in the adventure and others to which they were subjected through the incomprehensible and censurable want of foresight of the originator and managers of the scheme.

The Nor’-Westers could not consistently pretend that the country had no agricultural possibilities; for indeed it was through their own eulogies of these, as the result of the cultivation round many of their posts to eke out food supplies, that the Earl of Selkirk had his attention drawn thereto. But the fur traders contended, with reason, that until civilized means of commercial communication could be established, the attempt to establish an agricultural community was premature, and it was also dangerous alike to the settlers and the fur trade, of which the light and valuable product alone could stand the enormous cost of export to outside markets.

Conscientiously entertaining these convictions, inspired with sympathetic good feeling towards the settlers of their own Scottish race, as undoubtedly the Highlanders of the North-West Company were as individuals, it is slanderous to accuse them of being actuated by merely mercenary motives and the protection of the fur trade, and to say that they seduced and intentionally deceived more than half of their countrymen into deserting the colony, and from only selfish motives provided them with a free passage to Canadian settlements.

The Earl’s Gamekeepers vs. The Native and North-West Poachers.

However sympathetic the Nor’-Westers might feel towards the actual settlers themselves, their leaders had from the very first more than suspected that Selkirk, who had acquired a controlling interest in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s shares, intended to use his scheme of settlement as a means to, or a mere blind for, the destruction of their hitherto enormously profitable trade. If the settlers could be coerced into becoming soldiers, and the Hudson’s Bay Company be supplied by Selkirk’s undertaking to furnish them with a suitable class of servants in sufficient numbers to overawe the force of the Canadian company at Red River, the long line of communication between Montreal and Athabasca might be cut at that vital point—vital to the route itself as well as for providing the preserved provisions from the prairies required by the canoemen passing to and from the north and Fort William.

On January the 8th, 1814, Lord Selkirk’s agent, Miles McDonnell, under his commission from the Hudson’s Bay Company, as Governor of Assiniboia, issued a proclamation prohibiting the export of all such provisions, stating all these were required by the settlers. An edict was also issued commanding the natives to cease hunting buffalo on horseback, as the animals were thereby scared away from the Settlement.

Not content with putting these rules on paper, Selkirk’s agents proceeded to put them in practice by seizing pemmican belonging to the North-West Company in transit, and by breaking into their posts, while the guns of Fort Douglas commanded the route on the river so that boats might not pass.

The Tragedy of Seven Oaks.

On June 19th, 1816, a party of North-West Company’s men, numbering sixty-five, and composed of French-Canadian, English, Scotch and Métis engaged servants, besides a larger number of Métis and Indians hired for the occasion, while conveying provisions from a point above the fort to one below it on the river, in making this portage, out on the prairie to avoid the cannon of Fort Douglas, were pursued by Governor Semple, with a following of twenty men. The historian of Red River, Hargrave, says (page 487): The party, under Governor Semple, were provided with guns, but they were in an unserviceable state, some being destitute of locks and all more or less useless. (It is also said by another authority that they went without any ammunition to recharge their guns.) This fact, continues Hargrave, was, of course, unknown to their opponents, who were apparently sincere in the belief that the governor was prepared to offer serious resistance to them before the carnage commenced, after which their entire want of order and discipline rendered them incapable of reason or consideration. The infatuation which led the governor’s party to attempt by a vain exhibition of useless weapons to intimidate nearly three times their number of men to whom the saddle and their gun were instruments of their daily occupation, is almost incomprehensible.

The native levies of the Nor’-Westers had a superstitious horror of cannon. But as soon as they had drawn their pursuers out of range of the fort, choosing their own time and ground, they faced about. Opening out into skirmishing order, at which they were experts, they then confronted the compact body under Semple, with an equally strong opposing force, and threatened his flanks simultaneously with treble his numbers.

While thus outnumbered and unsupported and nearly surrounded by his already incensed adversaries, the unfortunate governor lost his temper with the North-West clerk, Mr. Boucher, who had advanced to parley, and seized the bridle of the latter’s horse. On this, the first shot was fired on the governor’s side, by a woeful accident, it is said, and was followed by an exchange of volleys. One account says that on delivering their fire the natives threw themselves backwards on the ground to reload, which was mistaken by the governor’s men as the deadly result of their fire, and they raised a cheer of triumph, bringing their opponents quickly to their feet with recharged weapons, which poured in a volley and converted the cheer into the shrieks of the dying and the groans of the wounded.

Up to this point the affair had been a fight, forced upon a well-armed, skilful and superior body by a very inferior force, which can scarcely be said to have been armed, blindly led into the jaws of death by their incompetent governor. But from this point on it became a brutal butchery of the wounded and a fiendish mutilation of the dead also, which revealed in all its horrors the danger of employing savages in disputes between the whites.

The Surrender of Fort Douglas.

Months before, the veteran Colin Robertson had received warning of the preparations being made in the west by the Nor’-Westers to avenge the pillage and capture of their property and posts by the Hudson’s Bay people. Robertson, as an experienced fur trader, had been appointed chief adviser to the inexperienced governor, and he was a man of tested courage. When his solemn counsel and advice was rejected by Semple, Robertson washed his hands of the business in indignation and betook himself to the Bay. Other warnings of the storm brewing in the west were given to the governor, and so unheeded that he did not even see that the flintlocks of his men were in order.

When natives brought sure news of the near approach of the North-West brigade, if his desire were to protect the settlers he had ample time to bring them into the fort, and, with their aid, hold it secure from attack, for the settlers numbered, at that time, two hundred, including their families. He might then have relied on their fighting in their own defence in the fort; although the policy of the settlers, living on their defenceless farms, had always been one of non-intervention in the conflicts between the rival fur traders, and they wisely desired to give the wild partisans of the Canadian company no additional cause for animosity and incur their vengeance by taking part in quarrels of which they had been, and were likely to be, the innocent and greatest sufferers. But after the defeat and slaughter of Semple and his followers had inspired their opponents with victory, and had had the reverse effect upon the settlers, who had by that time taken refuge in the fort, Mr. John Pritchard (the only one of Semple’s followers who had been given quarter and taken prisoner) was sent by the North-West warriors to inform the settlers that they must save themselves from their fury by immediate surrender, and, if so, a safe escort to Lake Winnipeg would be given them, and they would be allowed to take with them all their personal effects. At first, says Mr. Beckles Wilson, the colonists refused to listen to those terms. Sheriff McDonnell, who was now in charge of the settlement, resolved to hold the fort as long as there were men to guard it. But they were not long of this courageous temper. After fully considering the situation the settlers concluded to depart, and after several conferences between the sheriff and Cuthbert Grant, a capitulation was arranged.

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Colonists on the Red River in North America.

1. 2. A Swiss colonist with wife and children from the Canton of Berne. 3. A German colonist from the disbanded De Meuron Regt. 4. A Scottish Highland colonist. 5. An immigrant colonist from French Canada.

TYPES OF LORD SELKIRK’S SETTLERS IN 1822.

From a photo of black and white drawing of a Swiss Colonist, touched up by Mr. Lawson, artist of the Manitoba Free Press.

Courtesy of Dr. Doughty, Dominion Archivist.

The Nameless Brave.

The lives thus uselessly sacrificed by Semple’s unmitigated mismanagement were his own, those of his officers—Doctor White, Secretary Wilkinson, Captain Rodgers and Lieutenant Holte, and the only comparatively wealthy colonist, Mr. Alexander McLean, besides those of three other colonists and fifteen Hudson’s Bay servants, whose names are not to be found in any of the histories mentioning the massacre. Only one of the North-West levies, Batoche, was killed, and one, Trottier, wounded. Could not the names of those who perished with him be discovered and graven with that of Governor Semple on the monument which has been erected at Seven Oaks? That neat, but inconspicuous, monument is about a quarter of a mile outside the city limits on the east side of the old King’s Road, between old Fort Garry and the existing Lower Fort Garry—in fact on Main Street North. It is just south of Inkster’s Creek, and reads thus:

SEVEN OAKS.

Erected in 1891 by

The Manitoba Historical Society

Through the generosity of

The Countess of Selkirk

On the site of Seven Oaks,

where fell

GOVERNOR ROBERT SEMPLE

and

Twenty of his Officers and Men,

June 19, 1816.

The simple monument marks the site of the shambles into which the Governor of Rupert’s Land led the Hudson’s Bay Company’s officers and men, who followed him to death and butchery with courage and fidelity. Small as were they in numbers and so lowly in rank that their names have not even found a place on the inscription, their blood was not shed in vain. For their slaughter aroused the British and the Canadian Governments to intervene and enforce the policy which caused the union of the rival fur companies, and thereby made possible the permanent and peaceful establishment of the Red River Settlement.

Upon the monument proposed to be erected to the memory of the fifth Earl of Selkirk, as the Founder of the Colony of Assiniboia, might most appropriately be inscribed with his name and titles the names of the noble little army of martyrs whose death gave life to the Red River Settlement.

No punishment was meted out to those engaged in the affair by the courts of justice in Canada before which they were tried; but Mr. Alexander Ross, in his Red River Settlement, records that the ends of poetic justice were fulfilled by the violent or sudden deaths which befel the twenty-six of the North-West party who alone took part in the massacre of the wounded.

War Still in the North.

Although, at Fort William, and on the Red River, the Commissioner appointed by the British and Canadian Governments, Colonel Coltman, had restored peace and property, the war in the interior still went on. In 1818, under Colin Robertson and another former North-West officer, Mr. Clarke, a big expedition of canoes, manned by Canadian voyageurs, had carried the strife for trade into the Nor’-Westers’ great preserve on the Peace River and Athabasca. This was defeated and its leader made prisoner, all of which will be found in The Conquest of the Great North-West. In 1819 Mr. Williams, the fur trader, who had succeeded the unfortunate Semple as Governor of Rupert’s Land, however, with the Hudson’s Bay Company’s armed schooner Cathulin, on Lake Winnipeg, had transported a force of the De Meuron soldiers to Grand Rapids portage at the outlet of the Saskatchewan River. There he laid in wait for the fur brigades of the Nor’-Westers, and as each arrived, all unconscious of danger, their officers were taken by surprise and made prisoners, and their furs seized. In the Athabasca brigade Colin Robertson had been brought out, still a prisoner, but effected his escape at Cumberland House before reaching the Grand Rapids, where Governor Williams was waiting to rescue him. Williams took his prisoners to Norway House, and sent them on to York Factory. This was the last of what may be called the military contests of the sixty years’ war for the fur trade.

The Union of the Companies.

The contests between the partisans of the contending traders had been conducted in the remote obscurity of the wilderness, and this state of things might have continued much longer without the rumors and reports, more or less unreliable, which reached the Canadian and British Governments, rousing them into action. But from the moment that Lord Selkirk had secured the grant, which he had engineered from the Hudson’s Bay Company, giving him an empire of infinite possibilities, and he attempted aggressively to take possession of it and exploit it, whether he designed it or was merely the unconscious instrument, building better than he knew, it was inevitable that a contest would arise on a scale big and important enough to force itself on the notice of both governments. The fur traders of both companies could no longer, in their mutual interest to envelop their trade in the secrecy of solitude, wash their dirty linen at home. To the eyes of prudes and puritans, whose actions and vices were masked and cloaked by the concealment of cities and civilized society much more effectively than were the lives of men who lived in the open on the rivers and lakes, the forests and prairies, of the wilderness, whenever the doings in that wilderness should be reported officially and put in print, the state of affairs so revealed of the fur countries may have appeared appalling and something to hold up their hands at in holy horror.

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RED RIVER SETTLERS’ DWELLINGS NEAR FORT DOUGLAS IN 1822.

From a reproduction in black and white, by Mr. Lawson, artist of the Manitoba Free Press, of a water-color by a Swiss Colonist, in the Dominion Archives, Ottawa.

In England the sympathies of such were with those devout officers of the castles, forts and fortifications, settlements, and plantations, on the coasts of Hudson Bay, who gathered the monk-like members of their garrisons to perform the service of Almighty God every Sunday and holy day, in the wanton attacks made upon them by the fierce and licentious freebooters and free traders from Canada, led by escaped rebel Highlanders from Scotland.

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EARL GREY ON THE NELSON RIVER EN ROUTE FOR HUDSON BAY.

In Canada the pays d’en haut, discovered and exploited by their voyageurs under renowned leaders, who carried the Cross as well as commerce into the territories of the heathen, was considered the patrimony and heritage of their French-Canadian representatives and descendants, who were glad to find congenial employment with a company largely officered by their Gaelic kindred and co-religionists from Scotland, who were engaged in defending their territorial rights against the greedy and